James Webb discovers the most distant galaxy ever observed

 Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered the most distant known galaxy to date, one that is so far away that it existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Since Webb began its science operations in 2022, astronomers have used it to look for very distant, very ancient galaxies and have been surprised by what they found, in Artifacts. 

Not only have they found many of these distant galaxies, but the galaxies are also brighter and more massive than they expected — suggesting that galaxies evolved into large sizes faster than anyone imagined.

Video: JADES (NIRCam Image with Pullout). The NIRCam data was used to determine which galaxies to study further with spectroscopic observations. One such galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0 (shown in the pullout), was determined to be at a redshift of 14.32 (+0.08/-0.20), making it the current record-holder for the most distant known galaxy. This corresponds to a time less than 300 million years after the big bang.

The newly discovered galaxy, called JADES-GS-z14-0, is named after the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program and has a redshift of over 14. Redshift is a phenomenon in which light that is coming from a very distant object is pushed toward the red end of the spectrum due to the expansion of the universe, so the further away something is, the more red its light appears. For the very early galaxies observed by Webb, their light has been shifted so far to the red end of the spectrum that it no longer appears as visible light, but instead as infrared. Webb’s infrared instruments (unlike, say, the primarily visible light instruments used by telescopes like Hubble) are perfect for detecting these extremely distant galaxies.